Even more powerful than Android?

Apple has a reputation for being a top-tier chipset designer, delivering blazing-fast performance that has often put its Android competitors to shame. The Apple A14 Bionic is the company’s latest chip, powering the entire iPhone 12 lineup. It was the first announced chipset to be built using TSMC’s cutting-edge 5nm process, bringing with it upgrades to performance and energy efficiency beyond the largest 7nm designs of 2020.

During the iPhone launch presentation, Apple spent more time comparing the A14 Bionic to the much older A12 than to the more modern A13. That hints at lower performance gains in this generation. With Android phones benefiting from an improved Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus model and the Snapdragon 875 just around the corner, the performance gap could be narrower than ever.

We have the iPhone 12 Pro at home. So we thought we’d run some benchmarks on the chip to see how it worked. We will also delve into the novelties of the Apple chipset.

Read more: What is an SoC? Everything you need to know about smartphone chipsets

A closer look at the Apple A14 Bionic

The biggest news with the Apple A14 Bionic is the move to the smallest 5nm manufacturing node in the industry. Although interesting, the analysis suggests that the change at 5nm has only achieved a 1.49-fold reduction in matrix size rather than TSMC’s claims of a 1.8-fold reduction by 5nm. It’s getting harder and harder to shrink the inner workings of a chip, especially when it comes to memory. Regardless, that’s not the only new thing about Apple’s latest chip.

Apple sticks with a 2 + 4 big.LITTLE hexa-core CPU architecture design, but switches to the new “Firestorm” and “Icestorm” cores. Apple is targeting notebook-class CPU performance with its new chip, which may end up as the foundation for the Arm-powered Macbooks launching later this year. Apple’s custom CPU design efforts over the years are really starting to move away from the standard parts we’ve seen at Arm. The big question is how well these more powerful cores can maintain their peak performance in a smartphone form factor. Interestingly, Apple did not comment on efficiency during launch.

Apple has spent more on silicon outside of traditional CPU and GPU upgrades.

On the GPU side, Apple is also sticking with a 4-core GPU cluster, which is built entirely in-house. This design looks the same as the A13, and any performance improvements are likely to come from clock increases rather than major improvements in architecture or core count.

The remainder of the 11.8 billion transistors, a 38% increase over the A13’s 8.5 billion, can be found in improvements to the 16-core neural engine for artificial intelligence and image processing workloads. Apple has 11 TOPs for AI inference performance, up from 6 TOPs on the A13. On paper, that’s still behind the Snapdragon 865’s top 15 AI performance. However, these numbers are reasonably meaningless. The TOPs do not tell us what each operation does or how much energy they consume to execute.

The iPhone 12 Pro is also Apple’s first 5G smartphone. Like the Snapdragon 865, the A14 Bionic does not have an integrated 5G modem. Instead, Apple has turned to Qualcomm and paired the chip with a Snapdragon X55 4G and 5G dual-mode modem. This includes support for mmWave and sub-6GHz, 5G FDD, 4G / 5G spectrum shoreline, and support for future-proof standalone 5G networks. Modem speeds are limited to 7 Gbps on mmWave networks. However, consumers will see speeds much lower than that. Interestingly, Apple seems to have opted for a thinner Chinese-made USI mmWave antenna instead of Qualcomm’s QTM525 found on Android smartphones.

Specifications of A14 Bionic vs Android SoC

IPhone 12 Pro Performance Test Results

Let’s start by comparing the new Apple iPhone 12 Pro against the previous generation iPhone 11 Pro and its A13 processor.

For starters, there is a noticeable jump in CPU performance thanks to the new cores. Single-thread performance increases 21% on the popular GeekBench 5 benchmark. Also, multi-core performance improved by a decent 17%. This is due to the switch from the “Lightning” and “Thunder” CPUs to the new large and small “Firestorm” and “Icestorm” microarchitecture. Plus any additional increases in clock speed available through the smaller 5nm process.

Overall system performance, via AnTuTu, sees a decent jump as well. This is due to a combination of faster CPU and GPU. However, most of the improvement seems to come from memory system improvements such as Apple’s new compression technology and large on-chip caching. There definitely seems to have been a noticeable improvement here – up to 30% more than the previous generation in total.

The GPU result is more disappointing. We did not register any performance improvement between the two phones with 3DMark. Although this could be due to the particular benchmark tests and the few extra screen pixels the GPU has to handle in the iPhone 12 Pro. AnTuTu shows a greater boost for GPU performance over the last-gen chipset, but it’s not huge. Even Apple’s own estimates put the improvement below 8% from A13. This time is definitely a case of minimal improvement for graphics performance.

Of course, there is more to smartphone SoCs than just CPU and GPU performance these days. Apple has also invested a good chunk of silicon in its image processing and artificial intelligence components. However, the improvements here are much more difficult to test with benchmarks.

And against Android?

There is a common mistake when comparing Apple and Android benchmarks – they are not a fair comparison. Many benchmarks, particularly those that emphasize the GPU, run using different graphics APIs. Like Apple Metal vs. OpenGL and Vulkan used by Android phones. As such, the scores work a bit differently, making direct comparison difficult.

What we can do is compare the performance of the GeekBench 5 CPU. For others, we will have to look at the difference in performance between the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro and compare it with a previous comparison that we made between the older Apple phone and the Snapdragon from Qualcomm. 865 to put us in the right ballpark. So let’s review the math.

For starters, GeekBench 5 and our own previous tests give a decent single-core CPU advantage to the Apple A13 and, by extension, the newer A14. However, with more large cores, we previously found that the Snapdragon 865 went head-to-head and even outperformed the Apple A13 in multi-core scenarios. The advantage was only 8%, which is why the new A14 Bionic outperforms with its great CPU upgrade. However, the gap is still quite narrow and could easily be closed again next year.

Apple regains a healthy CPU advantage with the A14 Bionic.

Again, we are not able to compare GPU benchmarks directly due to different screen resolutions and APIs across devices. However, the iPhone 12 Pro seems to increase overall system performance by a very healthy margin. Hence, it will extend its lead over current-gen Android SoCs in this regard as well. However, the Asus ROG Phone 3 and its Snapdragon 865 Plus offer really competitive graphics performance.

Overall, Apple’s A14 looks like the fastest chip on the market right now. Although, we must remember that the new Android SoCs are hitting the market as we speak. They are better placed to face the A14 Bionic. These include Huawei’s Kirin 9000 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 875, which we will test in more detail soon. With minimal GPU gains in this generation, Android phones are very likely to close this long-lasting gap in 2021.

Apple A14 Bionic benchmarks: the verdict

With notable CPU and memory improvements, but limited GPU gains in this generation, the A14 Bionic is a clear sign of Apple’s ambitions. With Arm-powered Macs on the horizon, the A14 doubles CPU gains to bridge the gap between mobile and laptop products and extend Apple’s lead in Android SoCs. The A14 is expected to be the foundation for Apple’s portable chips, after all, albeit with a smaller silicon footprint for graphics and core count.

At the same time, Apple has devoted more silicon than ever to “AI” and photography capabilities. Two cornerstones of the heterogeneous computing capabilities of smartphones. Next-gen Android SoCs are almost certain to follow in that regard, but we don’t expect CPU performance to go as far into laptop territory as Apple. Although Arm’s powerhouse Cortex-X1 could certainly help bridge the gap. Overall, though, it’s Apple’s gaming edge that appears to be most threatened in the next generation.

Read more: Arm Cortex-X1 brings the fight to Apple’s powerful CPUs

The last question in all of this is how well 5nm helps the chips maintain peak performance. We will be able to build a better image once these little chips hit the market. We will check how the Apple A14 Bionic fares compared to Huawei’s Kirin 9000 and Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 875 as soon as possible.